For 35 years, Autograph has been an agent of change within the visual arts. Established in 1988, Autograph's mission is to champion the work of artists who use photography and film to highlight questions of race, representation, human rights and social justice. Through doing so, we invite people to explore the creative and critical power of visual representation in shaping our understanding of ourselves and of others. Every year we engage hundreds of thousands of people locally, nationally and globally at our gallery in London, digitally and through projects taking place in partner spaces.
Collecting and preserving images
Since our foundation, Autograph has collected photographic material which addresses gaps in the visual representation of Britain's cultural history and its diverse communities, to support others in learning about subjects and stories left out of historical and contemporary visual records. We currently hold approximately 5,000 prints, 10,000+ negatives, 5,000 slides, as well as several thousand contact sheets and a small amount of archival film and ephemera. The collection has been built through a series of strategic commissions, generous donations, funded acquisitions and initiatives of curatorial care. Consequently, the number of objects in the collection is always growing.
Whose stories?
Autograph is an inclusive space where the myriad stories of marginalised people are valued and cared for, presented, published, discussed, shared and spread. Our work serves to highlight who and what is absent or present in visual representation: whether within national museum collections, social media stories or contemporary exhibitions and publications.
Some of the earliest works in our collection by Rotimi Fani-Kayode (one of Autograph's founding signatories) and Joy Gregory serve as prime examples of our values and mission: to foster informed enquiry and personal creative development, promote respect for and appreciation of difference, encourage empathy and reciprocity.
Born in Nigeria, Fani-Kayode moved to London in the 1980s where he produced a complex body of photographic work, exploring themes of race, sexuality, spirituality and the self. His masterfully staged and crafted portraits stand as powerful visual statements. At the core of his practice is an important emphasis on the cultural politics of difference.
Celebrated for her pioneering work on self-identity in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Gregory's intimate engagement with ideas around blackness, femininity and beauty is epitomised in her series Autoportrait (1989/1990). Autograph's first artist commission, the series was a direct response to the lack of representation of black women within lifestyle consumer magazines.
Our collection contains works made by fine artists, social documentary and high street studio photographers and also includes images from personal family albums. It covers key periods in the formation of culturally diverse communities in Britain, including the post-war Windrush generation and Victorian era alongside more contemporary works.
The work of Bandele 'Tex' Ajetunmobi, for example, entered the Autograph collection when his niece managed to save negatives and prints following the photographer's death. Ajetunmobi was a self-taught photographer who stowed away on a boat to Britain from Lagos, Nigeria in 1947. He settled in East London and for almost half a century, Ajetunmobi documented and recorded the daily lives of his friends and acquaintances, focusing on immigrant communities and the multi-racial nature of his local area. Though most of Ajetunmobi's work was destroyed when he died in 1994, Autograph is preserving the works we have, as important historical documents of social and cultural life in the East End from 1950 to 1980.
Exhibiting and commissioning artists
Autograph's exhibitions and commissioning programmes provide under-represented artists with opportunities to research, create and share work that might not otherwise be produced. Autograph curates exhibitions which are displayed in our gallery at Rivington Place, London as well as touring internationally. We also loan works from our collection, contributing to exhibitions around the world.
In 2018, Autograph opened the critically acclaimed exhibition Liberty/Diaspora, by Senegalese artist Omar Victor Diop. The exhibition – Diop's first solo display in the UK – has since gone on to tour Estonia, Sweden, Finland and Germany. As part of the exhibition, Autograph commemorated the 70th anniversary of a significant moment in British history by commissioning Diop to produce two new works responding to the arrival of the HMT Empire Windrush, which docked at Tilbury Port, Essex on 22nd June 1948, carrying 492 economic migrants from the West Indies to address labour shortages in the UK following the Second World War.
Diop's images celebrate this migratory moment and its shaping of history and culture in the UK, and they provide a visual device which will help Autograph preserve and share the stories and legacies of members of the Windrush generation for many years to come.
Another major commissioning moment for Autograph came with the onset of the pandemic in 2020. Though the doors to our gallery had to remain closed during the lockdowns, we continued to support creative production, commissioning 10 artists to produce work which would help document and share the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on marginalised communities.
The Motherland Calls
(from the series 'Contagion: Colour on the Front Line') 2020
Aida Silvestri 
As part of the commissioning project, entitled Care | Contagion | Community – Self & Other, artist Aida Silvestri created an experimental body of work that explored the impact of COVID-19 on key workers, linking experiences from the past with the present.
Aida's commissioned work, Contagion: Colour on the Front Line linked the charged political rhetoric adopted by both mainstream media and politicians during the pandemic, with imperial narratives and wartime sentiments from the past. For Silvestri, these slogans not only recall her formative years living in Eritrea under authoritarian communist regimes, but they also expose striking parallels between Britain's imperial past and present. In the work, Silvestri highlights the devastating impact of COVID-19 on frontline workers of colour by 'infecting' her digital drawing collage and portrait works with commodity substances such as coffee, tea, sugar or cocoa, creating coloured coronal splashes on the artworks – further amplifying the notion of 'contagion'.
Here we've focused on sharing the stories behind some of the highlights from our collection, more of which you can now see on the Art UK website. Autograph is a place to see things differently. If you're in London, come and see some of our work for yourself; our current exhibitions by artists Wilfred Ukpong and Mónica Alcázar-Duarte run until 1st June 2024 and explore issues of ecological urgency and the impacts of colonialism on the climate. Entry is always free.
Visit Autograph's website for news, learning resources, events and more
